When deciding which CMS to use, there are many aspects to consider. Flexibility, security, costs, user-friendliness and ongoing support to name a few. Of all the options out there, Umbraco is the CMS we most often recommend at Embrace to help our clients excel with their digital strategy. A friendly, flexible and fast-growing open-source platform, Umbraco is used by companies from smaller business brochure sites to complex multi-region corporate websites. September 2021 saw the launch of Umbraco 9 with the migration of the entire codebase to a new framework, ensuring a solid foundation for staying technologically relevant in the years ahead.
There are many reasons why you should be using Umbraco for your CMS – here are our top seven:
1) It’s a blank canvas
Built on Microsoft’s robust .NET framework, Umbraco is extremely flexible and extendable. You’re not tied to any pre-existing structure, making it possible to achieve anything in the development phase. This differs from some CMSs still embedded in the publishing mindset, which are essentially blogging platforms that can be modified by plugins and other software. These may be cheaper to set up, but costs can rise dramatically for integrations and other advanced use cases. With Umbraco you can design a bespoke solution tailored specifically to your requirements, and it can be modified as your needs evolve.
2) It’s open source and collaborative
One advantage with Umbraco is that it is open source, so unlike some other platforms, there’s no license fee to use it. But this doesn’t mean you’re getting an inferior product – quite the opposite. Because it’s being developed in a collaborative, public way, and it’s so popular, there’s a thriving community of ‘Umbracians’ who gather online and in various cities internationally to create and contribute to a platform you can trust. As an Umbraco user you can benefit from joining this knowledgeable and enthusiastic community – there’s always someone who’ll know the answer to your question. The online mothership is our.umbraco.com which provides a friendly forum along with lots of helpful documentation and packages.
3) It’s secure
Umbraco is known as being one of the most secure CMS platforms on the market. It performs much better than WordPress, which relies on plugins and other software that can expose security holes for hackers to exploit. Umbraco’s community of thousands of developers continually peer-reviews the platform behind the scenes. It’s constantly tested, audited and updated, so when bugs and security issues do surface, these are quickly patched up.
4) It can integrate with other systems
As customers demand seamless service across various brand interactions, it’s becoming more important for multiple systems to be connected to your website in real-time. Through REST API, Umbraco can integrate with pretty much any third-party system including CRM (customer relationship management), email, PIM (product information management), and booking platforms. This elevates your website from a content publishing outlet to a powerful data hub that allows you to understand your customers better and communicate with them in a more personalised and effective way.
5) Simple to edit and publish content
With its clean, user-friendly interface, Umbraco is one of the easiest systems for content managers to get to grips with. There’s no need for coding knowledge so editors and contributors can get started with very minimal training. The CMS’s intuitive design is easy to use and there’s a host of online materials and a supportive community to help users get in the swing of content creation.
Some of our favourite content management features are:
- Easy to understand tree diagrams to show where content is
- Accurate content previews across the full range of devices
- Ability to create draft content for review before publishing
- Ability to schedule content to go live at a time and date of your choice
- Cross-browser compatible so quick changes can be made by phone or tablet
- ‘Rollback’ feature to a previous version if a mistake is made
- Audit trail shows who has edited what content and when
- Easy to manage user permissions system for different levels of access
- Media library to organise and edit images and videos.
6) It can boost SEO
There’s more to SEO than being able to control the metadata that’s added to your pages. Search engines take into account performance, accessibility and usability in their rankings. Umbraco discourages “code-bloat”, to maximise technical SEO performance, and lightweight sitemap packages help search engines find and index your content. Plus, Umbraco is super SEO-friendly for content managers. Pages can be set up with default fields that apply across the site or sections, but these can easily be altered manually on a page-by-page basis if required. And with social media an increasingly important aspect of search, Umbraco makes it easy to configure metadata that is used by social sites, so your content is shown in the most enticing way.
7) It supports multilingual, multisite solutions
This is one reason why Umbraco wins out over CMSs such as WordPress for bigger organisations and international companies. It allows CMS users to look after various applications in one go and in as many languages as required all in a single system. So you can manage a multisite, multilingual solution with side-by-side content editing. Your site visitors will only see content tailored to their language and region.
So, in summary, Umbraco offers limitless design and functionality possibilities, and can easily integrate with third-party systems. It’s very secure and supports the highest performance metrics when set up right. Its active developer community is continually improving the platform and content managers enjoy its intuitive, user-friendly interface and level of support. It requires more upfront planning and budget for development than some other CMSs, but ease of integration and updating means the total cost of ownership can work out better over the long term.
If you’d like to discuss any aspect of your website or CMS, do get in touch.